For me, the 48 hours officially ended at 7 this morning. Practically speaking, that meant it ended about 11:45 last night when I fell asleep halfway through Genesis by Bernard Beckett. I found a couple of nice chunks of reading time yesterday, bringing my total up to 8 hours and 13 minutes, plus about an hour of networking time. Finished Catching Fire: wow. More on everything later but wanted to squeak this in under the deadline and now I must dive into my busy day. Visit MotherReader for the roundup!

Fun, fun, fun. I knew going into this that I wouldn’t be able to drop everything all weekend long and read—couldn’t have even if we hadn’t had a birthday in the family yesterday. But when that unexpected bout of early-morning reading-in-bed presented itself on Saturday morning, I decided to join the Challenge just for fun. And it was fun. I really enjoyed checking in with other participants via Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

I squeezed in more reading time than I get in a normal weekend by: ignoring my garden (hello, army of weeds), reading during baby naps instead of cleaning, shopping, or Harvest Mooning, ignoring my Google Reader (except for Challenge-participant blogs), and (at one point) standing in the kitchen glued to Catching Fire while Jane’s birthday cake was baking. (Note: this means I left all the baking dishes for Scott to deal with. He gets major props.) I also made no attempt to inch forward on the quilt blocks I’m making for my virtual quilting bee. (But I’m getting there, ladies, I promise.)

The irony, of course, is that I’d have probably been glued to Catching Fire during every available moment this weekend anyway, Challenge or no. That’s what happened with Hunger Games, for sure. I’ll be writing more about them in days to come—but I don’t want to say too much about Catching Fire yet, since it doesn’t pub until September. No spoilers here. I’ll say this much right now: I think it’s even better than the first one.

Comments

I’m also glad, in a sneaky kinda way, that it’s not just me that gets hooked into books still to the detriment of everything else… my defense is I’m sure I’ll grow out of it, you know, when I become an adult 😀

I’m glad that you were able to participate. I was kind of wishing I had saved Catching Fire to read during the challenge. If I’d started it at say, 11:00 pm, I would have been able to actually stay up late reading. Oh well. Lesson learned for next year. I love the mental image of you standing there reading while waiting for a cake to bake. (I myself listened to an audiobook during some food prep time, and that works well for me).